Hope, Hype or Horror? ‘The AI Doc’ Director Charlie Tyrell Questions What Comes Next

Source Domain: www.cnet.com

I write (and think) about AI for a living. In any given 30-minute period, I waver between worrying that AI will destroy everything I know and love, and believing — or at least wanting to believe — that it could change humanity for the better.

Dread turns into optimism, which seeps into ambivalence, which then turns back into dread-induced cynicism. Rinse, repeat. Goodness, my central nervous system needs a break.

That debate is at the heart of a new documentary arriving in theaters today, March 27. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (104 minutes) first premiered at Sundance in January and later screened at SXSW. The film explores the wild industry and mind-melting world of artificial intelligence. It takes an unflinching look at the tension between those who feel extreme doom versus those who feel extreme optimism about the AI boom, and how to make sense of that polarity.

The documentary’s two directors, Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, were soon-to-be fathers during the filmmaking process, their kids born a week apart. Through the lens of fatherhood, the documentary makes use of hundreds of interviews, both onscreen and offscreen, with key technology and risk experts worldwide — from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety — to explore whether AI is the greatest existential threat we’ve ever known, or the most singularly exciting technology we’ve ever known, or something else entirely.

Roher won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Navalny (2022), and Tyrell was on the Oscar shortlist for his documentary short My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes (2018). The AI Doc was also produced by the teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker).

I spoke with Tyrell this week, before the documentary’s theatrical release, to discuss fatherhood, the two-and-a-half years of making this documentary, inspirations, goals and society’s…

Source